In front of me, in a living room on the outskirts of Budapest, Pilo sits plaintively on his hind legs like a dog. He wags his tail like a dog, and he enjoys his belly being rubbed like a dog. When asked sternly, and provided with a suitable cushion, he deigns to lie down like a dog. But Pilo is not a dog. He is a pig — a black-and-grey Minnesota mini-pig to be precise, if “mini-pig” can ever be a precise term for animals which can weigh as much as an adult human.
Since the age of two months, Pilo has been raised just as a pet dog would be. In a country where most other pigs would by now have ended up as smoked sausages, the four-year-old is settling in for the long haul. He wears a red dog harness and sleeps in a worn dog bed. His trotters slip across the laminate floor. His wet snout, two thousand times more sensitive than my nose, swivels towards my hands then my shoes.
Pilo’s owner, a thin, expressive dog trainer named Szilvi Gergely, has come to a conclusion. Her pig is “smarter” than her two dogs, she tells me in uncertain English laced with certain intent. Training him was much easier because “he’s incredibly motivated by food”. It took Pilo just three days to learn his name and a week to start coming when called. He can open the garden gate with his snout. On weekdays, the pig will wake her up before 6am. On weekends, he has learnt that she expects to sleep in. “Sometimes he is like a Swiss clock,” she tells me. I look from pig to dog, dog to pig, and it is difficult to say which is which.